Thanks to Amie for helping with this list of blogs we’ve been collecting and reviewing this week (and some from last week). This latest round of blogs have also been added to the big list of search engine marketing blogs.

Randy Morin ran his KBCafe Blog Awards again for 2006. In the SEO Blog category, Barry kicked ass again (while on vacation no less) as predicted. Thank you to everyone who voted for Online Marketing Blog, which was the underdog in every way. Of course, there should have been about 100 or more other blogs in this category besides ours.

Surprisingly, Matt Cutts lagged way behind in the SEO category, but he did win best Google blog over the corporate Google blog. Jeremy Zawodny also beat out the Yahoo Search blog. Hmmm, do you think there might be a message there?

Other winners in categories related to marketing or online included TechCrunch who blew away the Web 2.0 category. Darren Rowse of Problogger led the Webvertising category.

A few days ago, 901am.com got the scoop that Blogsmith was going to be released to the public early in 2007. It’s aimed at taking on blogging sites like WordPress.com, Blogger and TypePad. Details are still sketchy, but Blogsmith already has a good start.

Blogsmith is is owned by AOL / Time Warner and it powers some of the largest blogs on the net including Engadget, TV Squad, Download Squad and my favorite TUAW. With Blogsmith powering these blogs, they’ve had time to work out the bugs, optimize the code and make sure that everything runs at peek permanence for tons of visitors. Even with all that testing though, giving any service to the general public will render issues.

Every year these things run there’s more and more competition. I have to say, there are some really, really excellent blogs in these lists. Competition is fierce in the SEO category and some of the categories are no brainers.

I bumped into Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal in the press room here at SES Chicago and he mentioned something about updating the SEJ design. By the looks of the screen capture above, it’s a pretty nice upgrade. Loren mentioned that the design was by Chris Pearson, the same fellow who worked on SEOBook.com and Text Link Ads.

With the conference last week, I missed posting my weekly list of SEO, social media and online PR blog links, so let’s start off the week with a nice list. As a reminder, these are blogs that I’ve either recently discovered or recently “re-discovered”.

WebProNews Blog – Fairly new and it’s about time! Mike, Chris and all the WPN gang are revving it up lately.Web Ink Now – David Meerman Scott’s blog on public relations, marketing and blogging.Social Media Group – Canadian business blog on social media and corporate blogging.Natural Search Blog – One of Stephan Spencer’s blogs on SEO.Abhilash – “Boutique SEO With a Little Brown Sugar”. A persistent SEO with a sense of humor if nothing else. Finally met Abhilash in Vegas last week.Joe Dolson – Usability and web design wisdom.Search Engine Land – Danny Sullivan’s new blog with Chris Sherman and Barry Schwartz.Search Rank Blog – SEO goodness from David Wallace. We’ve both been in the SEO biz for what, a million years and we still have not met at a conference?

It only took 5 years, but Andy Beal has finally come over to the world of WordPress for his blog, MarketingPilgrim. Previously, Andy ran SearchEngineLowdown.com on Google’s Blogger platform, building it up to one of the top SEO blogs on the Internet. Then after going out on his own, started MarketingPilgrim.com using the same tools.

The new design sports links to Andy’s consulting services of which I now have first hand experience. My public relations agency recently engaged Andy to provide some training via webinar to our PR team on the subject of brand monitoring and reputation management. Eight of our staff were in attendance and I have to say, Andy knows his stuff. Not only is he a great consultant on SEO firm management and search marketing, but he has established himself as a subject matter expert on the topic of brand monitoring and competitive intelligence as well.

Recently Google added links to blog search in Google News and now Google Alerts has been updated to include blogs. The Google Alert options now include:¬† News, Web, Blogs, Groups or Comprehensive. Time intervals of notification are: as it happens, once a day or once a week.

Google Alerts are very useful to see who is writing about you or your cliens. It’s also use for identifying when optimized press releases or articles are getting indexed.

It’s good to see blogs getting more play in the mix of Google search functions. What’s next?

As blogs become more important sources of information and competition for users’ time and attention against mainstream media, many marketers and public relations practitioners continue to stumble about the blogosphere like a bull in a china shop.

Online Marketing Blog gets about 5-10 pitches per week on average, which provides more than enough of a sample on how blogs are getting pitched these days. What’s the verdict? It doesn’t look good.

A few of these pitches are right on or just lucky. Many are simply crap. Some come from friends but never make it to a post. Some are from complete strangers, but are very relevant and get in. Some are borderline where I’m interested, yet I never hear from that company again.

For the past week I’ve been beta-testing a new product from Patrick Gavin and Andy Hagans of Text Link Ads called Feedvertising. Other beta testers include Jim Boykin, Phillip Lessen, Brian Clark and several others. This is a service that allows you to monetize your RSS feeds with ads. Text Link Ads will sell the ads for you, or in my case, I just put in ads for some things I’m doing with Marketing Sherpa. You can do it either way or both.

Not only is Feedvertising a potential money maker, but it’s also a clever way to cross promote other areas of your blog, company web site or other web sites that you publish.

Business Week is taking votes for their annual Best of the Web, which is not to be confused with the most excellent web site directory and blog directory from BOTW.org. There are 23 categories and two of them are related to blogs. The selection for “favorite blogs” includes an interesting mixture ranging from Scoble to Sand Hill Slave to Tech Crunch.

At the time of this post, there are only 744 votes so far with Tech Crunch the clear leader, but I think the SEO/SEM readership out there could make quite an impact on that if they wanted to.

If you would like more of a variety of blogs to vote for, then go ahead and fill in the write in form. I know I did. I put one in for Search Engine Roundtable and another for Matt Cutts. Good luck guys!